Mother Dough

for Beth Gilstrap Nothing more natural, nothing more to mourn. Each new skin flinches at the cool air it hasn’t known. It instantly tightens and stretches. A thousand new cells of life appear. Aren’t we wondrous things, like dough and yeast, like all of the heat and pressure that should kill us, like coming out of the incinerator with structure and skin, both tough and fragile, it can take a good tear, and another, and another after that, be eaten up whole or dipped piece by piece into salt or sweet, miracle of miracles, there is still more and more, no matter how much is taken away? Each part of us, given or taken, cannot help but grow, cannot help but teach all of the new life around us, “This is how you do it, this is how you feed your life, keep it going; it’s like eating an elephant: one bite at a time.”